Oregon - Leaving Lake Oswego

I do not have any pictures of activities in Lake Oswego. We tried.

It started out with an attempt to ride the Willamette Shore Trolley:

http://wst.oregontrolley.com/

It only runs for a limited part of the year, though that's fine. What's a little less helpful is that you cannot buy tickets in advance. You can't buy them online. You can't go there, find out all of the tickets for that day are sold out, and buy tickets for a future day.

Their excuse is that it is all volunteer run. They do charge money, and one would think that they could make more money with a little more efficiency. Chances are good they could find a volunteer to work out some basic e-commerce design, or a spreadsheet for tracking advance reservations.

(Wonderfully, for their Christmas Ships tour they are showing the ability to purchase tickets online. Unsurprisingly, everything is sold out for the year!)

Now, if there was a value in people making treks out to Lake Oswego, being disappointed, and then choosing some other local activity, that could work well. I don't think that is the plan for two reasons.

One is the poor navigability of Lake Oswego. Street names change multiple times, turns pop up suddenly, and it is really easy to miss entrances. There is a good chance that getting to where you are going will involve a few extra turns as you loop back around to correct your overshoot.

We think about going places a lot, researching and seeing which things are close together. We knew that we were supposed to be close to the Elk Rock Garden, which was another thing that we wanted to try.

We checked directions and started heading to there. Once again, navigation was an issue, though this time it involved much narrower and steeper streets. It also involved something that looked exactly like a private drive.

Going back and checking maps and things later, I have to believe we were in the right place, but there was no signage whatsoever. It looked like we would have to park on the grass and go past the end of the road and houses. This is not particularly welcoming. If you want people to visit, you should give just a few indicators that they are in the right place, and that they are not likely to be shot for trespassing.

That was the other reason I had to feel like Lake Oswego is not really encouraging tourism.

There was something interesting that happened on this doomed trip that kept it from being a total loss. Going down another narrow street, and then up, although the foliage was overgrown and it was hard to tell where we were, I suddenly realized we were in front of that Italianate castle that I have seen from boats.

Now, I already knew that it had never been occupied, so maybe that made it less disappointing to see what a dumpy street it was on.

Having seen these homes from the backs, I know that they are huge and expensive and they all have docks for boats and even pontoon planes. The walks (or climbs) down are pretty long, but that's just the river side, right?

Well, if you wish to travel by land, you will be on steep, narrow streets with greenery obstructing your vision. I would have thought it was strange that things weren't better maintained, except a shocking number of the houses had for sale signs on them. In addition, they were all for sale through auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's, which makes me think they are not particularly easy sales.

You know, where I live is pretty good.

When we were fighting the streets to get to places that didn't want our business, Lake Oswego felt smugly snobby. After that street, it seemed sad. I guess both things can be true.

I do hear good things about George Rogers Park. I am not strongly motivated to check it out.